About WheatCAP

The WheatCAP project

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) awarded the WheatCAP consortium $3.4 million for research into the development of new wheat varieties that are adapted to different geographical regions and environmental conditions.

The overall goals for this project are the validation, characterization and deployment of QTL for grain yield components in wheat and the training of a new generation of plant breeders. The specific objectives of the project are to: 1) Characterize 15 QTL for grain yield and identify the underlying genes. 2) Validate the candidate genes using mutants and transgenic approaches.3) Deploy beneficial alleles in commercial varieties and advanced breeding lines. 4) Develop genomics tools to characterize the regulatory regions of the wheat genome. 5) Train a new cohort of 15 plant breeders, and make the training resources widely available.

The purpose of this web portal is to serve as the entry point to the products and services the WheatCAP will deliver, provide periodic reports of its activities and publish job openings.